Table of Contents
- What the Segovia scales actually are — twenty-four scales on seven pages
- Where they came from — the surviving fragment of an unfinished method
- Why they spread — and why plenty of teachers don't use them
- What the fingerings are doing — shifting exercises in scale clothing
- The rhythm ladder — Belmin Okanovic's routine, one subdivision at a time
- Beyond the printed fingerings — learn the territory, not the route
- How to actually practice them — the mistakes the book will not catch
1. What the Segovia scales actually are — twenty-four scales on seven pages
Quick answer: The Segovia scales are twenty-four diatonic scales — the twelve major keys and their twelve minor counterparts — each given one fixed fingering across two or three octaves. Belmin Okanovic teaches them as a complete technical system rather than a warm-up. The set covers keys, octave span, position work, shifts, and string crossings.
Ask a classical guitarist what "the Segovia scales" are and you will usually get a book, not a definition. The book is Diatonic Major and Minor Scales, and it is smaller and stranger than its reputation suggests: twenty-four scales, each written once, each carrying a single set of left-hand fingerings, across roughly seven printed pages. No method text, no graded exercises, no chapter on the right hand. The publisher's description of the modern edition sets out the contents plainly — twelve major and twelve minor scales, each spanning two or three octaves. That is the whole system.
What makes them a system is the fingering, not the notes. Any guitarist can work out the pitches of a two-octave A major scale; what Segovia supplied was a decision about where on the neck those pitches live and when the left hand moves to get them. Before that, scales in guitar methods were incidental — a page in Carcassi, a page in Aguado, fingered ad hoc. Segovia treated the fingering itself as the organizing principle.
They are also, deliberately, not a pattern grid. Where modern fretboard-geography teaching hands you a transposable shape, the Segovia scales do the opposite: each key gets its own route, chosen for what it demands rather than for how neatly it tiles. That is why they feel unfamiliar to anyone who learned scales from box patterns.
Belmin Okanovic's Segovia Scales Routine is the most recent dedicated treatment on tonebase, and he frames the set as a technical curriculum rather than a warm-up.
💬 "Among them are, for example, learning the layout of the fingerboard, developing the ear through major and minor harmonic and melodic scales, improving both apoyando and tirando technique, building coordination between the hands." — Belmin Okanovic
One practical note: Diatonic Major and Minor Scales is an in-copyright edition and still in print. This article describes the system and how teachers use it; it does not reproduce it. Buy or borrow a copy.
2. Where they came from — the surviving fragment of an unfinished method
Quick answer: Segovia's scale fingerings reached the American market in 1953 through Columbia Music Company, but scholarship by Andreas Stevens traces them back to 1928 and two little-known European publications. They are best understood as the surviving fragment of a guitar method Segovia never finished, revised in 1967 and continuously reprinted since.
The date most guitarists know is 1953 — the year Columbia Music Company published Diatonic Major and Minor Scales in the United States. It is correct, and misleading. Research by Andreas Stevens, published in Soundboard Scholar in 2017 under the pointed title "Andrés Segovia's Unfinished Guitar Method," traces the fingerings back a quarter-century further, to 1928 and a pair of little-known publications in Spain and Germany. On Stevens's account, 1953 is not when the system was invented but when it found the market that made it permanent.
The word doing the work in Stevens's title is "unfinished." Segovia talked about writing a method for decades and never delivered one. What survives in print is a fragment: the scales, without the pedagogy that would have explained what they were for. Every argument about them since descends from that missing context. The scales were published; the manual was not.
The publication history after 1953 is one of steady entrenchment. A revised edition appeared in 1967; the book was republished in 2011, with Segovia's original preface partly replaced by a historical note. It has never gone out of print, and the publisher's family have called it one of the best-selling guitar publications of all time — a claim reported in Stevens's article rather than independently audited.
The teaching lineage matters as much as the print run. Segovia spent the war years in Montevideo, and it was there, in the late 1930s, that Abel Carlevaro began studying with him. Carlevaro went on to build the most systematic body of guitar pedagogy of the twentieth century — and, as Gaëlle Solal explains in her Carlevaro Left-Hand Technique: Key Concepts course, the first of his four cuadernos didácticos is devoted entirely to scales. Two lineages, one descended from the other, open with the same material.
Where the record is thin, say so. Segovia left very little written pedagogy, and much of what circulates about his teaching is oral tradition. Okanovic repeats one of the best-known lines: that Segovia said if he had only two hours a day to practice, he would spend both on scales. That is how the tradition remembers him; it is not a documented quotation, and this article does not treat it as one.
3. Why they spread — and why plenty of teachers don't use them
Quick answer: The Segovia scales spread because they solved a teacher's problem: seven pages, sequenced, covering every key, carrying a famous name. They never became universal. Aaron Shearer criticised them publicly, Abel Carlevaro wrote his own set of fingerings, and plenty of teachers use neither. Adam Levin calls the book "an absolute gem" — the honest description is one influential system among several, not the standard.
Method books multiply. Carcassi, Aguado, Pujol, Shearer, Noad, Parkening, Duncan — every generation adds more, and a teacher building a curriculum has to choose. Adam Levin's Guitar Pedagogy: Teaching Methods lesson is a tour of that problem, and when he reaches the technique shelf, the Segovia scales get the least equivocal endorsement in the survey.
💬 "If you want to play scales at a million miles an hour, like you're driving a Ferrari, then this is your one-stop shop for scale practice." — Adam Levin
His list of what the book delivers is not just speed. He credits it with lifting in the left hand, fingertip technique and legato — "you name it, it's absolutely an incredible resource" — and adds that you pick up a little theory along the way.
The seven pages are the point. A teacher does not need another two-hundred-page compendium requiring curation. They need something a student can be handed on a Tuesday and be working on by Wednesday, that covers every key, that will not be finished in a month, and that carries enough authority that nobody argues. Segovia's name supplied the authority; the compactness supplied everything else.
Carlevaro is the useful comparison, and it cuts both ways. He put diatonic scales in book one of his didactic notebooks — as Okanovic notes, emphasising how important it is for every student to study and practise them with great care. Two of the most influential twentieth-century lineages both open with scales. But Carlevaro wrote his own, and that is the distinction worth holding onto: the profession agrees on scales, not on these scales.
And the endorsement travels. Levin's lesson is not about scales; it is about choosing methods, which is why his verdict carries weight. He has used most of the books on the shelf, and this is the one he reaches for when a student needs technique rather than repertoire.
That is worth taking seriously. It is also one teacher's view, and the book has attracted sustained criticism from people with equally good credentials — the subject of the next section, and the reason these fingerings are more interesting than either camp usually admits.
4. What the fingerings are doing — shifting exercises in scale clothing
Quick answer: Segovia's fingerings are organized around position changes, not around the most convenient route through a key. Aaron Shearer reported that Segovia described them as shifting exercises rather than practical scale fingerings — a reframing that explains both their awkwardness and their value.
The most common complaint about the Segovia scales is that the fingerings are impractical: no guitarist would finger a scale that way inside a piece, so drilling them trains habits the repertoire never asks for. The complaint is not stupid. It is also, on the best account of Segovia's own intention, aimed at the wrong target.
The reframing comes from Aaron Shearer, secondhand but specific. In a 1989 Guitar Player interview with Jim Ferguson, Shearer said he had asked Segovia about the fingerings and been told they were only ever intended as shifting exercises — not practical scale fingerings — and that Segovia had worked them out as a teenager and never revised them. It is a two-link chain of attribution, and it fits the material exactly.
Read as shifting exercises, the design logic becomes obvious. Take the example Okanovic works through on camera: G major, two octaves, where the standard fingering moves the left hand from second position to seventh. A fingering chosen for convenience would stay put and cross strings instead. A fingering chosen to train the hand forces the shift, puts it at an exposed moment, and asks you to make it inaudible. The scale is the vehicle; the shift is the exercise.
Three things get trained at once, and they are hard to isolate any other way. The shift itself — the hand traveling a fixed distance and arriving accurately in tempo. Left-hand lifting and fingertip placement, because a shift punishes fingers that leave the string late or land flat. And legato across the seam, since the ear hears the join long before it hears the tempo. Hence Levin's list.
The right hand is not a bystander. Where the left hand shifts determines where the right hand crosses strings, and not all crossings are equal. Eduardo Inestal's Scale Secrets and Finding Fingerings makes the point sharply — "right hand plays a very important role while playing scales," and a fingering with few or no awkward crossings gives a scale noticeably higher fluidity. A printed fingering fixes those crossings for you: sometimes an easy one, sometimes a hard one on purpose.
5. The rhythm ladder — Belmin Okanovic's routine, one subdivision at a time
Quick answer: Okanovic runs the Segovia scales through a fixed ladder of rhythmic values — quarters, eighths, triplets, sixteenths — over C major to E major with their paired minors, at metronome targets of 60, 80, and 120 BPM. Inside each rung he cycles right-hand fingerings: i-m, i-a, m-a, apoyando and tirando.
Owning a book of scales is not a routine. Okanovic's contribution is the structure wrapped around it — built as a teenager to strengthen his apoyando and increase his speed, and one he says he still gladly returns to.
The outer loop is rhythmic density, not tempo. He plays a group of scales — C major through E major with their paired minors — first in quarter notes, then eighths, then triplets, then sixteenths. The metronome does not move. What changes is how many notes fit between clicks, and therefore how much recovery time the right hand gets. Anything hidden at quarter-note density becomes audible at sixteenths.
The tempo targets are three, and each asks a different question. Okanovic practices at 60, 80 and 120 BPM: at the slow end the question is tone and control, in the middle it is momentum, at 120 the sixteenth-note pass is a genuine technical test. He demonstrates at 80, and is explicit that the numbers are his, not yours.
💬 "Of course, everyone should adjust the tempi according to their own level and the time they have available." — Belmin Okanovic
The inner loop is the right hand, and it is where the routine stops being repetitive. Within a single pass Okanovic cycles three finger pairs: i-m, the default; i-a, which forces the weaker annular finger into a leading role; and m-a, rare in practice rooms and excellent for lateral independence. Each pairing runs both apoyando and tirando, and later extends into three-finger patterns. The scales stay the same; the technical problem never does.
Beyond the basic ladder come rhythmic variations: dotted eighths, dotted triplets, and a repeated-tone drill in which one pitch is hammered in sixteenths before the next note arrives as a quarter. That last one is the most portable idea in the lesson — it isolates a burst of right-hand strokes immediately before a position change, and works on any awkward passage in any piece. Okanovic closes with a conditioning oddity from a professor: reversed strokes, pushing the finger away from the palm instead of pulling toward it.
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6. Beyond the printed fingerings — learn the territory, not the route
Quick answer: Okanovic treats Segovia's fingerings as a starting point, relocating the printed shift onto different strings to generate several organized fingerings per scale. Inestal argues the same case from the other end — that there is no single correct fingering, and the player has to choose. Both aim at fretboard knowledge rather than obedience.
Okanovic learned the Segovia fingerings first, and thoroughly. Then curiosity got the better of him.
Take the G major shift again — second position to seventh. In the printed fingering that shift happens at one specific point. Okanovic demonstrates moving it: same scale, same notes, but with the position change taken on the fourth string, then the fifth, the third, even the sixth. Each version sounds different, feels different, and drills a different piece of the neck. The second shift, seventh position to twelfth, opens the same choices again. One scale, half a dozen legitimate routes.
💬 "Try to create as many organized fingerings for a single scale as possible." — Belmin Okanovic
The word carrying the weight is organized. This is not improvising differently every time; it is building several complete, repeatable versions and owning each one. Okanovic does exactly this inside a single pass, using one layout ascending and another descending. His stated reason is blunt: we do it because we want to learn our fretboard better. A guitarist who knows one fingering for G major has memorized a route. A guitarist who knows five has learned the territory.
Eduardo Inestal arrives at the same place from the opposite direction. Where Okanovic multiplies Segovia's fingerings, Inestal assumes you will have to invent your own — and gives you criteria for judging them. His central one is the positive versus negative string change: crossings taken in the comfortable direction for the leading finger flow, crossings taken the other way stick. His worked example is a C major scale in second position: one note taken as a stopped tone produces an awkward crossing, and the same note taken on the open string removes it. Same notes, different left-hand decision, and the right hand's whole experience changes.
Neither teacher is arguing that Segovia was wrong. They are arguing that a printed fingering is a claim, not a law — and that the way to test it is to build the alternatives and listen. "It doesn't mean that I have to do it," Inestal says of his own solution. "It's one possibility. As I said, you have to choose."
7. How to actually practice them — the mistakes the book will not catch
Quick answer: The most common errors are running all twenty-four on autopilot, chasing tempo before control, and never varying the right hand. Practice a rotating subset with one technical focus, use Okanovic's rhythm ladder for structure, and treat the shifts as the exercise. Ten to fifteen focused minutes beats an hour of drift.
The Segovia scales come with no method text, which means every mistake made with them is made in good faith. Here are the ones worth naming.
Mistake one: running all twenty-four every day
Twenty-four scales at three tempos across four subdivisions is not a warm-up, it is an hour. Okanovic works a subset — C major through E major with their paired minors — and says openly that you can take fewer or more. Rotate: five keys this week, five next.
Mistake two: treating them as speed work from day one
The book's reputation is speed, and Levin's Ferrari line does not help. But a shift practiced fast and inaccurately is a shift being trained to be inaccurate.
Mistake three: one right-hand fingering forever
Most players run every scale i-m, tirando, then wonder why the scales stop producing improvement after a year. The scales are not the variable. The right hand is. Cycling i-m, i-a and m-a across both strokes turns one page into a dozen exercises.
Mistake four: skating over the shift
If the position change is the exercise, playing the notes on either side accurately while smudging the join means practicing everything except the thing being trained. Isolate the two notes across the shift, play them slowly until the join is silent, then rebuild the scale around them.
Mistake five: expecting them to transfer directly to repertoire
They will not, and were not designed to. What transfers is the underlying capacity — accurate shifting, quiet lifting, legato under pressure. The fingering you use in a piece should be engineered for that piece, by the criteria Inestal lays out. The scales build the hand; the repertoire gets its own fingerings.
A realistic weekly shape: ten to fifteen minutes, most days, on a rotating subset. One technical focus per session — the shift, tone equality between i and a, legato — held for the whole session rather than swapped every scale. The full ladder occasionally, rather than badly every day. And a periodic detour into building your own fingerings for a scale you already know.
💬 "We have always to serve music. It's not about us. It's about the music." — Eduardo Inestal
Frequently asked questions
What are the Segovia scales?
They are twenty-four diatonic scales — twelve major and twelve minor — published by Andrés Segovia with a single fixed left-hand fingering each, spanning two or three octaves. The edition is called Diatonic Major and Minor Scales and runs to about seven printed pages. What makes them a system is not the notes but the fingerings, which are organized systematically around position changes rather than around convenience or transposable patterns.
Are the Segovia scales good for beginners?
Not as a first scale experience. The fingerings assume you can already shift confidently into the seventh position and above, and the book supplies no explanatory text, no exercises and no graded sequence. A beginner is better served by one or two scales in first position with strict right-hand alternation, then a transposable pattern or two. Come to the Segovia set once shifting is a skill you have rather than a skill you are acquiring.
How long does it take to learn all 24 Segovia scales?
Months, not weeks, and that is the correct pace. Learning the notes and fingerings of one scale takes a single session; making the shifts inaudible at tempo takes considerably longer. Most players work a rotating subset of five or six keys at a time, as Belmin Okanovic does with C major through E major and their paired minors, and add keys as the earlier ones become reliable rather than on a schedule.
Why do the Segovia fingerings feel so awkward?
Because they were built to be. Aaron Shearer reported that Segovia described them as shifting exercises rather than practical scale fingerings, and read that way the awkwardness is the design: the fingerings force large position changes at exposed moments instead of avoiding them. A fingering optimized for comfort would stay in position and cross strings. This one does the opposite, on purpose.
Do I have to use Segovia's fingerings exactly as printed?
No. Learn them as written first, so you know what the system claims, then start building alternatives. Okanovic demonstrates moving the standard G major shift onto four different strings and treats each version as a separate exercise. Eduardo Inestal makes the broader case that fingering has no single correct answer and that choosing well is a skill in itself. Both approaches assume you know the printed version first.
How fast should I play the Segovia scales?
Slower than you want to. Okanovic works at 60, 80 and 120 BPM, changing rhythmic density rather than tempo — quarters, then eighths, then triplets, then sixteenths at the same click. That structure keeps the pulse honest while the workload increases. Speed above the point where shifts stay clean and tone stays even is not building technique, it is rehearsing errors at volume.
Are the Segovia scales enough on their own?
No. They train shifting, left-hand lifting, fingertip accuracy, legato and two-finger alternation extremely well. They do not train three-note-per-string a-m-i systems, string-crossing avoidance, transposable pattern knowledge, or the musical shaping of a scale inside a phrase. Treat them as one strong component of a technical routine rather than the whole of it, and supplement deliberately where they are silent.
Where can I get the Segovia scales?
Diatonic Major and Minor Scales is published by Columbia Music Company and remains in print through the usual sheet-music retailers, in both standard-notation and notation-plus-tablature editions. It is inexpensive. Because it is an in-copyright publication, the fingerings are not reproduced online legally in full — buy or borrow a physical copy rather than relying on scanned PDFs of uncertain provenance.
Next steps
Back to the hub: Classical Guitar Scales: The Complete Guide
- How to Practice Segovia Scales with Clarity and Speed — the routine walkthrough of Okanovic's lesson, with a free workbook. This article explains the system; that one hands you the practice plan.
- Classical Guitar Scale Fingerings: The Systems of the Pros — how the pros choose fingerings when the printed page runs out.
- Classical Guitar Scales for Beginners — where to start if the Segovia set is still out of reach.
- Making Classical Guitar Scales Fun — three ways to stop a daily routine going stale.
- How Vladimir Gorbach Builds Fast Guitar Scales — the metronome progression, when speed is genuinely the goal.
Learn the Segovia scales from players who use them
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External Sources
- Andreas Stevens, "Andrés Segovia's Unfinished Guitar Method: Placing His 'Scales' in Historical Context," Soundboard Scholar 3, no. 1 (2017). DOI 10.56902/SBS.2017.3.5 — https://digitalcommons.du.edu/sbs/vol3/iss1/5/
- "Sor, Segovia and More in New Soundboard Scholar," Classical Guitar magazine — https://classicalguitarmagazine.com/sor-segovia-and-more-in-new-soundboard-scholar/ (summary of Stevens's 1928 finding)
- Andrés Segovia, Diatonic Major and Minor Scales, Columbia Music Company — publisher listing, Theodore Presser: https://www.presser.com/494-00195-diatonic-major-and-minor-scales.html
- Simon Powis, "The Segovia Scales: A Practical Guide," Classical Guitar Corner — https://www.classicalguitarcorner.com/the-segovia-scales-a-practical-guide/
- "Segovia Scales and Their Hindrances," Charleston Classical Guitar — https://charlestonclassicalguitar.org/blog/2018/09/18/segovia-scales-and-their-hinderances/ (source for the Shearer report, citing Jim Ferguson, "Aaron Shearer: The Art & Science of Guitar Instruction," Guitar Player 23, no. 7, issue 235, 1989, pp. 61–63)
- Abel Carlevaro biographical dates — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abel_Carlevaro
